Tag Archives: British Malaya

Below is a photo of a dedicated food court in Ipoh, my hometown. By ‘dedicated’ I mean that it’s not attached to a shopping mall – the GP Food Court is a destination in itself. The building sports ultra-high ceilings that permit an extra floor above. This space houses a gym, though I can’t imagine how anyone would exercise in the midst of such tempting smells. Which may explain why I’ve yet to see the machines upstairs being used.

The GP Food Court, Ipoh

You can smell the food court before you actually enter, thanks to massive doorways in every direction. As if the aroma of so much food cooking wasn’t bound to waft upwards and outwards anyway, at the GP Food Court there are giant fans to aid this drift. The fans here really are enormous. You can glimpse an example above, on the top edge of the photograph. They swing at speed, too, though you can’t see this: you’ll have to take my word for it!

Food courts everywhere excel in choice, but there’s choice and then there’s choice. Take a peek at the photograph below.

Enough to Give You a Headache

This is the selection at just one stall. Notwithstanding the neon sign advertising ‘Rice’, this stall also serves noodles, in case you don’t fancy rice. It’s a well-known fact that you can’t serve rice and noodles on their own – you need things to eat them with – and this stallholder is thoughtfully offering a panoply of dishes: braised, fried, boiled, double-boiled (all right, I made that up, though I imagine that they would if they could). There are raw dishes too, in the form of salads.

The sheer amount of choice can induce a headache. This is what happens to my partner; on each and every trip to Malaysia there’s always a first time in a food court and it’s as if she has never seen anything like it before. She’s overwhelmed, her eyes don’t know where to focus and her brain stops making decisions. She opts instead for the one or two dishes she knows – and never tries anything else.

Chicken Chop Rice with Guinness Sauce, Anyone?

Malaysians, on the other hand, are so blasé about food choice that stallholders have to be inventive. Ever tried Chicken Chop Rice with Guinness Sauce? Me neither. There’s also Portuguese Style Chicken Chop Rice on the top left hand side – a nod to our colonial history.

Most people know Malaysia as a British colony, but the Portuguese were actually here before them, followed by the Dutch. The latter two powers only conquered Malacca, a beautiful and very historical port town south of Kuala Lumpur. Our colonial past would explain why Cheese Baked Chicken Chop Rice is on this menu – cheese is definitely not Malaysian.

You may also notice that the signboards have Chinese ideograms and English words. This is because the GP Food Court is not halal, you see, which means that its patrons are largely Chinese and Indian. The Malay populace – who by law have to be Muslim in Malaysia – would be frowned on if they entered a non-halal food court – not frowned on by us, but by Malaysia’s religious officials and the religious police among its citizenry. Who said food couldn’t be a political tool?

Nonetheless, there are (for the moment) still Malay vendors selling food inside Malaysia’s non-halal eating places, including at the GP Food Court. They usually specialise in satay – a traditional Malay dish of meat that’s diced and marinated, set on skewers and then grilled over a charcoal flame fanned by palm leaves. Satay is eaten with a rich and deliciously spicy peanut sauce. The woman satay seller in the GP Food Court owns satay stalls in two other food courts – and we eat at all three (I love her satay).

To cleanse the palate, there’s also fruit at the GP Food Court. Not just any fruit, but imported fruit. In England or France, a trader would proudly proclaim his fruit as being British or French, but we in Malaysia still have the whiff of a complex. The subtext from this stallholder’s sign is that the fruit must be good, since it’s imported.

There are thousands of food courts like this all over Malaysia. There are also halal food courts, of course. For instance, the food courts inside Malaysia’s shopping malls are all halal – because only hawkers offering halal food can gain operating licences there. Whether halal or non-halal, whether located in Ipoh, Kuala Lumpur, Penang or Malacca, on each of my visits in the previous ten years, every food court I went to was packed. But what people eat and how much they eat has changed – because times are now tough in Malaysia.

None of this should affect visitors, however: the country remains stunning, the people welcoming, the food fabulous. Even on my most recent trip the meals I had ranged from good to superb: it’s hard to have a terrible meal in Malaysia. If you ever make it there, I would definitely recommend a visit to a dedicated food court. Be dazzled; be spoilt for choice. Do what Malaysians do: let your nose and eyes guide you. If the food smells good and there’s a queue, chances are, you won’t regret it.

In the second video, I read a short excerpt from the book. Family, food, friendship and identity are key themes and this video contains pictures of the delicious kueh (or cakes in Malay) that are integral to the story, as well as images of old Ipoh, the town in which the story is set. Thank you to Cafe Rasa in Stratford, London, for supplying the kueh shown and to Dr. Ho Tak Ming for allowing us to use images from his book about Ipoh, When Tin Was King.

Your manuscript has finally been accepted for publication, so now you simply sit back and relax, right? Ah… if only.

I had been told that transforming my raw manuscript into a final product would entail a huge amount of work. The trouble with phrases such as “a huge amount of work” is that they’re abstract facts, a bit like knowing how far the Moon is from Earth. I had little appreciation of what was to come.

For the first few days, nothing happened. I signed my contract and the publisher promptly disappeared. I continued working on my second novel, which was then in its third draft. From time to time, I glanced at the publishing contract to make sure it was real. Then, the woman who had bought the rights to my novel, the Acquisitions Editor at the publishing house, contacted me. She is a key person, my point of contact, “my editor” as it were.

We began with a long and detailed questionnaire. (They seem to like questionnaires; I’ve already filled in more than one). The form asked all sorts of things, from basic facts to nightmarish questions. “Describe your novel in one sentence.” I groaned. How do you do summarise a multi-cultural, multi-layered work set in British Malaya that weaves in history, mythology and cuisine as it grapples with identity through the lens of a strong female character with ten children? I suppose I’ve just done it there, but the sentence is convoluted. I spent a weekend coming up with a better version. The marketing geniuses at the publishing house had their own ideas. You will see, once the book appears, whether we succeeded.

The questionnaire held out exciting prospects. There was mention of the book’s cover. A cover! The mere thought of my book having a cover brought a frisson.

However, first things first; what followed next was more mundane, an activity we writers are used to: editing. My publisher asked for a “developmental edit”. Developmental editing usually happens early on, when the outline and structure of a story are shaped and altered.

In the case of my manuscript, the changes the publisher wanted were minimal. Nonetheless, a person called a Developmental Editor, or Dev Editor, was tasked to work with me. In case you’re confused, this is not the same as the Acquisitions Editor. There seem to be many people in publishing whose job titles include the word “editor”. The Dev Editor’s role was to clarify anything in the arc of my story which she felt to be unclear.

Of course, I had to be persuaded that aspects of what I had called the Final Manuscript were actually unclear. Really? After looking through the Dev Editor’s questions, I put my objections aside. She was clearly a professional, and if she found something confusing, who was I to argue?

There I sat, hunched before a computer screen, scrutinising pages I had read hundreds of times before. I even explained the intricacies of Nyonyakueh to the Dev Editor. Can you describe what ondeh-ondeh look like, she asked. Given our tight deadline, I wondered whether such queries were necessary. There were times when I’m sure the Dev Editor herself would have preferred eating to reading. ‘Your manuscript makes me hungry,’ she declared, a confession I found gratifying. And yet, with her fresh eyes, she spotted an error in the narrative detail! The error was small, but given how many people had already read the manuscript, you would have thought one of us would have caught it before. This is an excellent illustration of why there can never be too many readings before a book is released.

At the moment, my manuscript is being examined by another type of editor, a “copy editor”. I had not understood what this meant: I thought the copy editor’s remit would be limited to correcting sentences and punctuation, but apparently s/he is also checking facts. This is fascinating. My novel is a history-rich, epic family drama – there’s rather a lot to check. I wonder whether the copy editor and the fact checker are the same person. Is this a Westerner or an Asian, possibly even a Malaysian? I imagine someone in a room somewhere, poring over an old map of Ipoh to look at the streets on which my characters walk. Is s/he making rough measurements to ascertain distances and at the same time sampling copious amounts of food to check my descriptions?

On the one hand, it’s incredibly reassuring to know that what I wrote is being verified in this way; on the other hand, waiting to see what is uncovered is nerve-wracking. I think I did a good job with my facts, but heaven only knows. Better to find errors now though, rather than later. Books have had to be withdrawn due to mistakes not being found in time. Even large publishing houses are not immune, as the case of Jonathan Franzen’s novel showed. (There, the wrong set of proofs was sent to the printers.)

As if the above weren’t enough, work is also commencing on an audio version of my book! I had no clue how an audio book was made, and the team helpfully explained the steps.

In recent years publishers have been vilified. Everyone knows that they act as gate-keepers. Because they hold the keys to distribution, they also keep the lion’s share of revenues. But now that I can see what the book creation process involves, how many strands of work there are and how large the team is, I know I could not do this on my own.

My Acquisitions Editor, who is American, was in town for the London Book Fair. We went to Sedap, the only London restaurant with Nyonya kueh on the menu, so that she could sample a little of what she had read so much about. We talked about the book, of course. If there is such a thing as pure excitement, I felt it then, as I thought of my novel being created. Alongside the thrill came anxiety too. A book is not like a business project report or a presentation: so much of yourself is invested in the writing of it. At the same time, it’s one of the easiest things to criticise. What that lunch helped me realise was that I was no longer alone on this journey. My editor and her team are as emotionally involved as I am. We all share a sense of anticipation, hope and nervousness. At the end of the day, it is the readers who will decide. The greatest test of all.